An unsatisfied need has long existed in the package shipping industry for a shipping system that allows an organization to monitor and control the shipping activities of its users.
In the past, individuals within an organization that wanted to ship a package had to manually complete a shipping label and present the package to a carrier or other shipping drop-off location. The organization tracked these shipments by keeping copies of the shipping labels on file. This manual process was both cumbersome and time-consuming.
With the advent of the Internet, new shipping systems were introduced that allowed an individual to input shipping information to the shipping system and have a shipping label delivered to their browser. The shipping label could then be printed and affixed to the package. These electronic shipping systems were an improvement on the manual process, but they still did not allow an organization to monitor and control the shipping activity of its users. In addition, a user of one of these systems could not associate a particular package shipment with a particular client; therefore, the organization had to again manually review the shipping activities to bill the shipping charge to a particular client or department.
Another shipping system that was developed to address some of these concerns is the ship-ticket shipping system. In these systems, a user generates a ship-ticket on a personal computer and prints the ticket on a local printer. The ship-ticket is not a shipping label but has the shipping information encoded on the ticket as a bar code. The ship-ticket is affixed to the package and the package is delivered to shipping center or mail room of the organization where the bar code is scanned and the shipping information is electronically captured into a central shipping system. A shipping label is then generated by the central shipping system and affixed to the package. As with Internet shipping systems, a ship-ticket system automates the shipping process and eliminates the manual process of completing shipping labels. Moreover, because the ship-ticket passes through a central shipping system of the organization, the organization can monitor and control the shipping activities of its users. However, the process is cumbersome in that it requires an additional step of scanning a first label to generate a second label.
An unsatisfied need thus exists in the industry for an improved shipping system for organizations.